Collocation in English: Comprehension and Use by MA Students at Arab Universities
Dr. Nafez Antonious Shammas

Abstract
An intricate area in communication and translation for Arab learners of English is collocation. This paper attempts to assess Arab MA students’ comprehension and use of collocation at four Arab universities. Testing these two factors relied on three questionnaires. The first consisted of 20 collocations in Arabic for the 96 respondents to translate into English; the second had 20 English collocations to be translated into Arabic. The third had 9 English collocations with four choices for each along with their Arabic translation equivalents, and the respondents were requested to choose the best collocator for each base. The respondents had no access to any references. The findings revealed that the errors in Questionnaire 1 were 1478 out of 1920 (76.979%), 1218 out of 1920 (63.437%) in Questionnaire 2, and 2712 out of 3456 (78.472%) in the choices of Questionnaire 3. The reasons for such weaknesses were analyzed and suggestions were made.

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